Ode to the Turkey Vulture

When and where I grew up turkey vultures were always called “buzzards.” I was probably 40 before I learned their proper common name.

I was a small-town/farmer-lite girl so I’ve known how to identify a vulture in flight since I was probably 10, but I’ve only relatively recently considered that their wing position offers vultures something other than just a place to put their wings. Those wings held in the recognizable V allow these huge birds with their six-foot wingspans to coast along on the thermals, letting them conserve energy as they look for and then circle over their food on the ground.

Although they appear black against the sky, when you see a turkey vulture at ground level, up-close and personal, as I often do these days, you notice some lighter streaks on their wings sometimes.  At least a few of the vultures in my current neck of the woods have very light wing tips, looking like they’ve donned white dinner gloves in dressy anticipation of their upcoming feast of tasty squirrel, possum or other dead, stinking morsel.  Along with that set of impressive black wings, one of the most recognizable features of the turkey vulture, is of course, that fleshy red head, resembling, of course, a turkey’s.

According to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources “committee” is the collective noun for a group of perching vultures. Gathering in committee, creating a brand, thinking about lunch. The DNR also reports that turkey vultures are protected by state and federal law under the USA by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.  So, don’t go vulture hunting. Cause I WILL turn you in.

Indiana’s ornithological types have been taking note of turkey vultures since at least 1892. That year Amos William Butler wrote in The Birds of Indiana: With Illustrations of Many of the Species that vultures were “common summer residents” in the northern part of the state but when “winters are severe they are sometimes absent for a few weeks. . . The people think very much of them and protect them.”

Vultures seemed rare in my youth but are common in my maturity, especially in my current locale. I can recall the first time I saw one circling over the city when I lived in Indianapolis, close to 20 years ago now. I was shocked then, but it’s not an uncommon sight these days, in the era of global climate change. And it seems like highly adapted behavior really. There are lots of dead things in the city. 

I see them at least weekly here in my life on the river. They are the clean sweepers of my rural world. And they’re some of my favorite photographic subjects. Perched on tree limbs or indulging in a fresh or festering dead critter, these guys fascinate me.

In my amateur birder world, I’ve noticed that vultures tend to hang in committees of two most of the time when they’re snacking or perched. But they often soar in larger graceful groups. They can soar high, high in the sky as they scout for dinner because the vulture has one of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom. They can detect the “plume” of rotting flesh even when it’s in the weensiest concentration of particles mixed in the atmosphere. A few parts per billion of stinky dead possum odor in the air sends up an alluring aroma to these guys on the lookout for their next meal. Studies have shown that they can find a dead critter within a few hours of its demise, even if it’s buried under leaves or otherwise not visible. The turkey vulture’s lamer cousin, the black vulture, is not nearly so well-endowed in the smell sense.  Turkey vultures rule in the world of flying smellers.

Adding to the turkey vulture’s aural arsenal is their also amazingly acute vision. A study comparing the turkey vulture's eyesight to their cousin's, the black vulture’s, determined that the red-heads had just as densely packed visual receptors as their far less smell-efficient cousins. So they see as well and smell a lot better. Turkey vultures are winners with the right stuff.

The turkey vulture is a member of the order Falconiformes, which also includes hawks, eagles, kites, harriers, osprey, falcons.  Some common traits found in this order are hooked beaks, sharp talons, that keen vision and a hind toe which opposes the other toes – functioning somewhat like our thumbs. Traveling deeper into taxonomic order, these birds are within the family of New World Vultures called the Cathartidae. This includes the California condor, the Andean condor and the king vulture of Central and South America. Cathartes aura is the scientific name specific to the turkey vulture.  Cathartes means “purifier”; aura’s synonyms in the dictionary are “atmosphere, ambience, air, quality, character, mood, feeling, feel, flavor.”  Vultures are atmospheric purifiers, a flying cleaning crew. And for this I thank them.

I do, in fact, feel mightily thankful for the work of the vulture. Just recently, when the momma fox I’d been watching raise a family of kits was hit by a damn car, I tried to avoid driving the road where her lifeless body lay so that I wouldn’t feel so dreadfully sad each time I saw her there squished. But three days later, I forgot and instinctively headed down my familiar trek only to see vultures gathered in their scavenging committee around that dead mom fox’s body. 

And I felt better.  Her death was no less tragic, but now I saw that it wasn’t wasteful. Her body fed all those vultures. In the end, what was left of her probably also fed a million microorganisms, but it was the vultures who brought the circle of her life to a close for me.

Living as I do in a house in the country with two aging cats, a river on one side and clover fields on the other, I’ve decided that if one of my cats dies while I’m still in this house, I won’t bury him. I’ll take his body into the fields and give him to the vultures. He’ll have a second use, like the fox. I’ll watch for the vultures circling overhead and know that he’s part of the circle of life, too.  If it were legal, I’d tell my sons to do the same with me. Put my body in the woods, sing a poem over me and then watch the sky for my last hurrah.

On pain and tragedy and beauty and life on the river.

I moved to this little cottage for a one-year experiment in country/river’s edge living. Actually, I had set myself the even shorter challenge of staying at least six months. Sticking it out for six months was going to be my minimum goal to count the experiment as a success.

Four years later, I’ve learned a thing or two. For one, I love this place. I’m not necessarily “in love” with it as I was for the first year or two, but I do still deeply love it. It is a relationship, me with this cottage on the river. We’ve had our ups and our downs, this place and I.

There are unexpected challenges to living here. So much of what I love, the beauty of being so close to nature, carries with it the constant potential for tragedy. Just last week I saw again the red fox that I’ve so enjoyed watching as she raised her yearly den of kits in a ditch pipe along one of the county roads. I’ve been worried about those kits because I’ve had to stop for them more than once driving home at night. Today I saw the adult fox dead on the side of the road. God damn. Humans cause so much death out here. Are her babies grown enough to survive alone yet? I hope so.

I think we are probably the worst of what nature has to offer.

And I’ve seen a human die here, too.  The winter of 2014, I saw a man drown in the cold, rushing waters of the Flatrock. I had watched this guy acting peculiarly in the woods across the river. Shouting, walking up and down the hills, falling down. Then I saw him down by a canoe that had sat down by the river unused for the two years I’d lived there. I’d wondered several times how that canoe managed to stay there, close to the river, and not get carried away in a flood. But it hadn’t and now that goofy-acting man was over near it.  And I was worried. I knew no one could get a canoe safely into the river at the speed it was flowing on that sleeting December day.

I went to my computer and sent a Facebook message to the canoe owner across the river. Then I walked back into the kitchen and looked out again. The guy was in the river, in the canoe, and in water up to his midsection. The canoe had swamped immediately. I called 911. 

“Some dumbass has put a canoe in the river and now he’s in the water. There’s no way he can get it out of there.  He’s headed to the dam in Geneva” I told the operator. But by the time I hung up, and in one of those very clear moments that you later wonder how you managed, I realized the police couldn’t possibly get there in time to save him. That the water was too cold and he’d have hypothermia very quickly, that I couldn’t reach him because he was across the river, but that maybe I could drive to the end of my road, race down to the river and yell at him to grab something. I knew that he could not be thinking clearly and maybe not thinking at all. I thought if I could yell at him and maybe shock him into clarity, I could show him where he could grab something and maybe he’d be able to get out of this.

So, I did that. I put on my shoes, grabbed a coat and got in my car, drove as fast as I could to the end of the road. I was thinking I’ll get Chuck out of his house and he’ll help me and maybe we can hold out a big branch or something. But I knew when I got out of my car that there wasn’t time to get help from Chuck. 

I heard the guy in the river yelling: “Help. . .Help”. I ran down the hill toward the water and saw his head bobbing above the current as he rolled along with it. I shouted “I’m here” as I ran down the hill. And then he went under. And he didn’t come back up.

A few other people came out of their homes within a few seconds but we couldn’t see him. He was gone.

The police came and someone said there were TV trucks on the bridge at Geneva and I should go tell them what I saw, but after I talked to the police I went home. I knew that if someone had seen my son drown and didn’t save him I would hate that person. It wouldn’t matter that there was nothing that could be done. I wouldn’t ever forgive someone who hadn’t saved my son. And I just couldn’t bear knowing I’d be the person his parents hated.

Months later they found his body. In the meantime I learned that he wasn’t a good guy. Convicted child molester. But, as the police detective said during the second phone call he made to me to ask again about what I’d seen, “he was still someone’s son.”

Ugh. Yes. I saw someone’s son die in that river I love. He had been looking for his white pit bull in the woods before he got in the water. They found the dog the next day.

That winter was hard. Isolated. It was beautiful and frosty outside. I didn’t want to be here. In the spring they found his body just around the bend from where I saw him go under.

The next year I decided to spend winter in the city, rented a house from a friend and left the river behind. I missed it, but not enough to stay even for a weekend.

But when I came back in the spring. I knew I loved it again.  There’s still tragedy here, but there’s tremendous beauty, too. And a chance to see and be part of life --- and death --- in ways I never experienced in the city.

We’ve weathered bad seasons, this little cottage and I. We’re no longer in the budding of our love affair. The bloom is mature. We’ve been through some shit.  But again this year as I returned home from winter in the city, the beauty of all there is here outside my door has me happy again that I’m back.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay at this little house on the river. It’s not a good place to be disabled or old, or tender-hearted. But it is a good place to be me for now.  For my soul for now. And for now I’m staying.